Anything like an enumeration of the original American society plays written and produced here during the last ten or fifteen years is not possible within the limits of a single chapter. They have been very many, and of all degrees of merit, the best and most creditable perhaps being _Young Mrs. Winthrop_, _Old Love Letters_, _A Gold Mine_, _Esmeralda_, _Conscience_, and _The Charity Ball_; but how long these are to live, and how they are to be regarded by the next generation--if the next generation has ever a chance to regard them at all--of course remains to be seen. _Fashion_, the first of the lot, survives only in its printed form, and the shell of the locust gives but a faint dry rattle, while the locust itself is as much alive as when _The School for Scandal_ was first seen in America over a century ago. Have we a Sheridan among us? or is he still twenty years away? ACT II. THE AMERICAN STAGE NEGRO. THE AMERICAN STAGE NEGRO. _Bottom_: "I have a reasonable good ear in music: let's have the tongs and the bones."--_Midsummer Night's Dream_, Act iv. Sc. 1. Shakspere's Moor of Venice was one of the earliest of the stage negroes, as he is one of the best. If the _Account of the Revels_ be not a forgery, he appeared before the court of the first English James in 1604, and he certainly was seen at the Globe Theatre, on the Bankside, on the 30th of April, 1610. Othello is hardly the typical African of the modern drama, although Roderigo speaks of him as having thick lips, and notwithstanding the fact that he himself is made to regret, in the third act of the tragedy, that he is "black, and has not those soft parts of conversation that chamberers have." Shakspere unquestionably believed that the Moors were negroes; and as he made Verges and Dogberry cockney watchmen, and altered history, geography, and chronology to suit himself and the requirements of the stage, so he meant to invest his Moorish hero with all of the personal attributes, as well as with all of the moral characteristics, of the negroes as they were known to Englishmen in Shakspere's day.